The Dead School

From the award-winning author of The??Butcher Boy comes a new novel of??extraordinary power that, according to the San Francisco??Chronicle, "confirm[s] McCabe's standing as one??of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of??Ireland."

In The??Dead School, Patrick McCabe returns to the??emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland??to explore the inner lives of two men: a??headmaster and a schoolteacher, each man the product of a??soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons??of loss and betrayal. Tension coils--until tragedy??strikes a young student in their charge, and the??latent despair and rage that has festered in their??hearts explodes onto the page. As in The??Butcher Boy, McCabe demonstrates his??remarkable command of the vernacular and an uncanny??ability to pinpoint the exact moment when ordinary??minds take flight into madness. Equally??compelling, equally heartbreaking in its impact, ??The Dead School has established McCabe??as one of the most celebrated writers of literary??fiction today.

"All it takes is one thing to go wrong and then--well everything else decides to follow suit I'm afraid. Mr Sun, who a minute before was saying, 'Hello! I'm Mr Sun! I'm your friend on this happy picnic day!' is opening up a big sunny mouth full of razor teeth." Macabre humor, grisly horrors, likeable characters, madness and pathos, shrewd allusions to pop songs and movies, and a supple prose style that sounds like Irish speech when read aloud--Patrick McCabe does it all. The Dead School is a dazzling novel, more complex and even more gripping than McCabe's The Butcher Boy. Here are the stories of two very different Irishmen, from different generations, whose lives intersect for a brief and mutually destructive time, and then continue, in misery, apart. McCabe deftly avoids the easy or dramatic ending and delivers instead the saddest, funniest, most horrible ending of all because it is so true to life.